Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [35]
Tall and lanky, when he entered the classroom for the first time, he tried to dress the part, wearing corduroy jackets with leather elbow patches, and a loose tie. “He was conservative with fine features,” says Chapin, who spent hours smoking pot and jamming on the guitar with Craven. “There was something Englishy about him, like a slightly seedy lord.” Craven developed the cultural pursuits of a Europhile aesthete, seeking out films by Bergman and Fellini and plays by Beckett.
His first directing assignment was an intimate staging of No Exit, the 1944 play by Jean-Paul Sartre about a cowardly man who discovers the afterlife is nothing more than being stuck in a room with two strangers. Craven had a dark side, but it wasn’t something that he always revealed. Continuing to write dark stories and a novel, he told Bonnie that by the age of thirty he wanted to be on the cover of Time magazine. That didn’t seem to be in the cards. Instead, Bonnie became pregnant and had a boy named Jonathan and then a girl named Jessica. As her family grew, she became increasingly concerned about the culture war simmering inside her marriage. Bonnie was ready for a settled life, but Craven had not exactly grown up yet.
The fact that he even had kids and a wife seemed a little odd. “He always treated it like it was a kind of accident,” Cameron says. One time Craven, fascinated by abandoned houses, insisted that they move into one with the kids. Bonnie played along at first, but when she saw that there was a hole in the kitchen and no running water, she refused. Craven went anyway, leaving home for a week.
Craven rejected the ideas of his childhood, but he was still searching for something to replace them with, leading to confusion and dark spells. “I had so much rage as a result of years of being made to be a good boy,” he says. “I think when you’re raised to be within such rigid confines of thought and conduct, what that does to a person is you think you are terrible if you violate the rules. It makes you crazy. Or it makes you angry. I’m surprised I never climbed to a tower and [shot people].”
Craven stayed in touch with his mother, who would come visit and bring an entire meal, clean the house, and wash all of Wes’s shirts. Craven was driven by competing impulses—to make his mother happy and to rebel against everything she stood for. Wes and Bonnie would occasionally visit Caroline’s home in Euclid, Ohio, a small house with a white picket fence and a lawn. When Craven entered his old house, his mom would lay into him: “Why do you live in that city, Wesley?” He hated when she called him Wesley. “Why don’t you do something different with your life?”
Craven was also becoming frustrated that he was not fulfilling his artistic potential, and his marriage became increasingly strained. “He felt that the atmosphere at Wheaton had really damaged Bonnie,” said Cameron. “He could shake it off and live a bohemian life. But he was aggravated that she could not.”
They planned a cross-country trip by motorcycle to patch things up. This was the era of Easy Rider, and setting out on the road was the epitome of hipster chic. They left the kids with a friend, jumped on a Honda, and went from Provincetown to Chicago to San Francisco. At one point, they stopped in the desert of Nevada to get something to eat. Waiting by the street, Wes noticed an arrow zip by his ear and a group of three young men in a pickup truck approached, threatening, eyeing his long hair. “We don’t like hippies,” one shouted. Wes said if they touched him, he would sue. One member of the ragged gang responded that if they wanted to kill him, they could throw his body in the salt mines and no one would ever find it. That stunned Craven; with the vulnerability of an urban kid in the middle of nowhere, he was absolutely terrified.